How AI Search Is Changing Visibility, Experience, and Conversion

AI Search Series: Article 1: Did AI Kill SEO? | Article 2: Why AI Traffic Converts

If you’ve been following this series, you already know the big picture. AI hasn’t killed SEO, but it has changed it — significantly — and the brands winning right now are the ones that adopted it early.

In our first conversation, Erica Gregory and Brandon Godwin covered the foundational shift: what AI-powered search actually means for your strategy, and why abandoning your SEO investment right now would be exactly the wrong move. In the second, they got into a real head scratcher: even as overall traffic declines, AI-referred visitors are arriving with higher intent and converting better than almost any other source. That’s because websites now serve as validation layers on top of discovery engines (like Google, LLMs, etc.).

Now they’re back for a third conversation, and this one looks at the full journey — specifically, how visibility, experience, and conversion shape how a buyer finds you, forms an opinion of you, and decides to act.

Watch the full conversation below, or read on for the in-depth insights.

How AI search is changing brand visibility…

Something big has shifted in client conversations over the last year.

Digital marketing leaders and business owners have moved beyond asking whether they should care about AI search or LLMs; now they’re asking where, exactly, they should show up — in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews (or all of them together?). The list of possible search environments keeps growing, and so does the pressure to be present on all of them.

Erica’s recommendation? Resist that pressure.

… But you shouldn’t try to rank in every AI platform, all at once

Trying to optimize for every platform, every prompt, and every possible search environment is less of a strategy and more of a way to exhaust your budget (and your brainpower). The smarter question is, “Where is our audience actually searching?“

That’s because different audiences use different search tools. For instance, a B2B decision-maker doing vendor research might live in ChatGPT. Alternatively, a consumer comparing options might be using Google’s AI Mode.

Understanding which platforms matter to your specific audience is what should drive your visibility investment. Once you know where to focus, earning LLM citations and appearing in AI overview results comes down to topical depth.

After all, AI systems don’t reward brands that publish broadly on everything — they cite brands that own their niche with sustained, credible expertise on the topics that actually matter to their audience. Decide what conversations your brand should consistently appear in and build depth in those topics. Once you do that, LLMs will start to learn that your brand belongs in their answers — it’s how they work!

What does LLM mean in marketing, and why should you care?

Let’s clear up a quick definition before we keep going.

LLM stands for “large language model”: the AI technology and machine learning framework that powers generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini. In plain terms, an LLM is an AI system trained on massive amounts of text that can understand questions and generate human-like responses.

For marketers, LLMs matter because they’ve become a primary discovery platform. People are now using these tools to do a lot (or all) of their searching for them: researching vendors, comparing solutions, and forming opinions about brands before ever visiting a website. If your brand isn’t showing up in LLM responses, you’re missing a conversation that’s already shaping your prospects’ shortlists.

How social media impacts AI search visibility

We’d be remiss not to talk about social’s influence on search visibility, especially since it’s connected to AI answers for everything from dinner recipes to digital marketing partners.

These days, social platforms double as discovery platforms, in addition to retaining their brand awareness value. And two of them in particular — YouTube and Reddit — are showing up in AI-generated answers more consistently than other social sources. That’s why an integrated social media marketing strategy has become essential for brands that want to show up in both traditional and AI-powered search.

Why Reddit and YouTube rank in AI overviews

Put simply, Reddit’s influence on AI search comes down to authenticity.

The platform is a truly massive repository of user-generated content written in real natural language and conversational search queries— i.e., the way people actually talk about their problems, ask questions, and describe solutions. That makes it ideal training material for LLMs, and it’s why AI systems reach for Reddit content when they want to reflect a genuine user perspective.

For marketers, emulating “Reddit-style” language is a smart move. How are real people in your market niche describing their challenges? What language are they using? That’s the same kind of language your content should reflect.

YouTube’s prominence in AI search is a different story — and a more direct opportunity — because:

• Google owns YouTube
• The platform is deeply indexed
• Video content is heavily cited in Google AI Overviews

When someone asks a question that’s best answered visually or through demonstration, YouTube is often among the first places AI looks.

How AI search is raising user experience expectations for websites

Along with changing brand visibility and altering social platforms’ role in marketing, AI is also forcing websites to evolve — specifically in terms of their user experiences. And it’s doing that by forcing brands to remove as much friction as possible to stay competitive.

Here’s the friction problem in a real-world example:

• Amazon introduced two-day shipping, and suddenly, five-to-seven business days felt ancient
• Nobody made a rule that fast shipping was required — it just became the expectation, and everything slower felt like friction by comparison

AI-powered search has done the same thing to the research and discovery process. When a user can type a question into ChatGPT and receive a clear, structured, confident answer in seconds, that becomes their new baseline experience. When that same user lands on a website that’s slow to load, hard to navigate, or unclear about what it actually does, the contrast is jarring in a way it simply wasn’t two years ago.

Users are arriving at your website more informed and less patient than ever. They’ve just moved through a fast, frictionless research experience. Any bump they hit on your site — a confusing headline, an unanswered question, a slow page — erodes the trust your visibility strategy worked to build. That’s a hard thing to recover from when the alternative (going back to the LLM) is one click away.

How to think about websites in the AI search era

The most useful way to think about this is how Erica described it in part 2 of our AI and SEO video series: Your website isn’t (just) a destination anymore. It’s a validation layer.

These days, a growing percentage of site visitors are arriving with a working understanding of what you do. That means the reason many visitors even come to your site is to confirm that what they learned elsewhere is actually true — and to find out what to do next.

Naturally, this changes what “good” web content looks like, since you’re not starting from zero. You’re meeting an informed visitor where they are and making the next step obvious.

Given all that, the best way to ensure your website provides a seamless, informative experience for users is to design your content for fast understanding and AI analysis. Fortunately, the same strategies work for both of these goals.

What is structured content for AI search?

At the technical level, structured data refers to schema markup and other code-level signals that help search engines and AI systems categorize and understand your content. But beyond that layer, structured content is also just good web writing. Think:

• Clear headings and hierarchy
• Brief paragraphs
• Whitespace
• Bullets where they add clarity

Essentially, it’s anything that helps a human scan and find what they need. Not coincidentally, the same things also help AI parse your content and extract what’s relevant.

The goal, then, is to make all the content on your website fully answerable. Ask yourself questions like:

• Can a user find the answer they came for quickly and easily?
• Can an AI bot pull the most relevant passage without digging through six paragraphs of preamble?

If the answer to both is yes, you’ve got structured content. Content that’s easy to summarize is easier to cite — and content with strong LLM citation potential is more likely to drive the kind of high-intent traffic that actually converts.

How to format website content for LLMs

Structured content principles translate into some pretty practical formatting choices. Here are a few that matter most:

• Lead with the answer. Don’t bury the lead in setup. If someone lands on a page asking a specific question, the answer should be reachable without first scrolling past an introduction, a history of the problem, and three caveats.
• Write headers that reflect how your audience speaks. “Our Innovative Approach to Client Success” tells an AI system very little. “How We Help Mid-Market B2B Companies Generate More Qualified Leads” tells it a lot. Headers that mirror real user intent — the actual questions people are typing — are the ones that get picked up.
• Define before you expand. Introduce a concept in plain language before you go deep on it. This improves readability for humans and interpretability for AI systems trying to determine what a piece of content is actually about.
• Consider comparison content. Comparison content like the one on this page helps LLMs naturally synthesize and present information in comparative structures — tables, side-by-side breakdowns, “X vs. Y” framings. Brands that publish honest, relatively unbiased comparison content increase the likelihood that AI systems pull from them directly, which means they get to shape the narrative instead of having it shaped by someone else.

AI reframes conversion as momentum

It’s easy to think about conversion as the cash register moment at the very end of the journey — the form fill, the signed contract, the completed purchase. That moment still matters, of course. But fixating on it exclusively means ignoring all the places where momentum quietly breaks down before anyone gets there.

There’s a better, more modern way to look at conversion: It’s any forward progress toward a business outcome, like:

• A deeper page view
• A video watch
• A return visit
• A content download
• A click-to-call

These are “micro-conversions,” and for service businesses especially — where the journey from first touch to closed deal can span weeks or months — they’re where the real story is. If you’re not tracking micro-conversions, you don’t know where people are falling off. And if you don’t know where they’re falling off, you can’t fix it.

Common conversion friction points

So, where do people typically fall off the conversion sequence? In our experience, a few of the most frequent offenders are:

• Slow load times. Users who just navigated a near-instant AI experience will not wait five seconds for your page to load. Research consistently shows that drop-off accelerates sharply past the two-to-three second mark. In other words, speed isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s table stakes.
• Mobile-unfriendly experiences. The majority of AI-powered searches now happen on smartphones, and desktop-optimized websites create massive friction on mobile. Tiny text, slow loading images, and navigation menus that don’t work on touchscreens send users straight back to ChatGPT or Perplexity for a different recommendation.
• Unclear or mistimed calls to action. Asking for the action matters, but so does asking for the right action at the right moment. A “Request a Demo” CTA makes sense for someone deep in research mode. It’s premature — and friction-creating — for someone who just landed and is still figuring out whether they’re in the right place.
• A confusing user journey. A first-time visitor needs to be able to intuitively move through your site, find what they need, and understand what to do next at every stage. If they can’t, your site generates friction and prevents forward progress.
• Unanswered questions. Nothing stops momentum quite as suddenly as an unanswered question that should be easy to address. So anticipate the things your audience is going to ask — especially the ones that tend to come up right before they’re ready to act — and answer them before they have to go looking.

Where to start optimizing your site for AI and SEO

With all of this in mind, here are two steps our team recommends to boost your search visibility, web performance, and conversion experience.

Start with your audience

Who are they? What problems are they trying to solve? How does your business actually help?

This level of clarity drives topical depth in your content, and that depth earns visibility in AI search. Luckily, the research that informs this doesn’t require a sophisticated tool:

• Talk to your sales team
• Talk to your customer service reps

They know exactly what questions people ask, what objections come up, and what language real prospects use to describe their problems. Layer modern keyword research tools on top of those conversations, and you’ll have a content strategy grounded in reality.

Audit your website with fresh eyes

Land on your homepage as if you’ve never seen it before and know nothing about your brand. Can you immediately tell what your company does? Do you know where to go next? Is there anything that creates confusion or raises a question you can’t quickly answer?

You’ll likely discover friction points that have been invisible to you because you know exactly where everything lives (what Brandon calls the “curse of knowledge”). Better yet, have someone outside your organization do it for the perspective of someone with even fresher eyes.

Looking ahead: What does agentic commerce mean for SEO?

Everything we’ve covered so far is happening now. But in the video interview, Erica and Brandon also looked ahead at how things might change even more in the months to come.

Research has shown that agentic AI will be massive. These are AI tools that don’t just answer questions but also act on a user’s behalf. For instance, they might:

• Book an appointment
• Make a reservation
• Complete a purchase

We’re already seeing the early infrastructure of this take shape in search.

Google recently released what it’s calling the Universal Commerce Protocol, a framework that allows merchants to enable purchases directly within AI Mode search results, without the user ever visiting a brand’s website. Etsy has already integrated it, and you can be sure that more businesses will follow.

Ultimately, at some point in the not-so-distant future, visits to brand websites might become fully optional for a meaningful slice of commercial transactions. And that means the technical integrity of your website — your product data structure, your schema markup, your site architecture — is more than just an SEO consideration. It’ll also be the commercial infrastructure that determines whether your products are purchasable in the environments where tomorrow’s customers are spending their time.

Putting it all together

Visibility, experience, and conversion are three stages of one big AI-driven journey. The brands that treat them as connected are the ones building real momentum right now.

Your audience finds you in an AI answer, forms a first impression before they ever click, arrives on your website already informed, and decides whether to move forward based on how clearly and confidently you confirm what they already suspect. Every stage feeds the next, and friction at any point can derail a potential purchase or partnership.

And — we reiterate — this is already happening.

If you’re ready to take a harder look at how these pieces are working together — or not working together — for your brand, let’s talk. And if you want to go deeper on the foundation underneath all of this, start with part one and part two of this series.

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